Case study: The Provost Office

The Office of the Provost documented all their processes and core documents into one binder. This binder is available for all employees within the Office of the Provost on the main drive as an electronic copy. They have 13 main sections and each section has an owner. The owner for each section is typically the one responsible for the processes documented under that section. The owner is also responsible for ensuring everything in their section stays up to date. This means if there are any changes to a process, they will need to update the hard copy as well as the soft copy. This process is also documented in the binder.

This project began with a major cleaning of the main drive and the Provost website. This ensures only the most updated documents are available. A project schedule and process map of this project was created and SMEs were identified for each section under the Office of the Provost.  The project took 4 months to complete with 2-3 hours a day dedicated to meeting with SMEs to document steps in each process.

There is an owner of the binder identified as well, Kim Gingerich, for approvals of any changes. They also dedicated a meeting once per year in the summer to go over the binder with everyone to make sure it is up to date.

The binder also includes things like:

• Health and safety procedures and guidelines
• Ordering supplies
• Everyone in the department’s job description

All processes are now documented which ensures the continuation of work in the case of an absent employee, whether they are on vacation or sick, anyone from the department can look up any process through the electronic binder and learn how to do a certain process step by step. 

Everyone in the department now uses the electronic binder specifically for checklists of certain processes and procedures.

Positives:

• Getting organized
• Drive and website is now clean and only has updated documents
• Helps with any future training
• The more people that were involved in this process the better, everyone felt a sense of responsibility and accountability towards ensuring the binder is always up to date
• Better communication between employees within the department and more team collaboration to document all processes

Challenges:

• Having a common consensus at the beginning and getting everyone to see the benefit of this initiative
• Asking people to do this on the side of their regular day to day operations
• Train people on how to properly update contents of the binder
• Sticking to the schedule initially created for this initiative